Heroes of the New Day

What began as a simple journey has turned into so much more...

The Dawn War

While the basics of the Dawn War are known well-enough to the average person (the gods fought some bad things called primordials, and the gods won), the details are somewhat less well-known. A decent Arcana, History, and/or Religion check will give you these additional details about the Dawn War, as will the book Chronicle of the Dawn War, vol 1 that you took from Karath’s body.

In the time before time, beings of raw elemental power called Primordials created the substance of reality.

The Gods tried to put order to the chaos of creation, but the primordials disliked this.

The first death of the Dawn was Oghma, the goddess of Truth, Prophesy, and Knowledge. Likely she was targeted due to her oracular abilities, though how she did not see the approach of her assassin is still unknown.

The primordial XXXXXX killed the dragon god Io by chopping him in two with a mighty axe. Bahamut and Tiamat were born from the remains, and some say that the first dragonborn sprang up from where Io’s blood fell to the earth.

At some point, the god Tharizdun went insane, and tried to stop the Dawn War by ending reality itself. Part of this attempt created the Abyss in the middle of the Elemental Chaos. Other parts of his attempt ripped the worlds apart. At one point, he even tried to summon dark Outsider powers (stronger than god or primordial) to the realm to consume everything.

In light of Tharizdun’s attempts, a number of wiser primordials, called the Xel’Naga, agreed to work with the Gods to forever chain Tharizdun and erase his memory from reality. We can see how well that memory thing worked…

The Xel’Naga used their power to broker a peace deal at the end of the Dawn War, forging the Primal Ban, which kept most gods and primordials from entering the material plane ever again. If the energy of the primal ban was ever weakened, it would mean that both gods and primordials might be able to directly influence the prime material plane… though each one who came through would weaken the Ban further.